How Psychiatric Terms Are Constantly Misused And Highjacked By The Media

We should campaign for sending a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to each writer.

Many of the psychology and psychiatric terms that are used in casual conversation or in mainstream media don’t mean what we think they do. I’m referring to well-defined medical terms that end up appropriated, misused and distorted into colloquialisms until they lose all substance.

Is this politician a “sociopath”? Have you heard this famous actor has been diagnosed as “bipolar”? Are you a little “OCD” about keeping your kitchen tidy? is this celebrity “hysterical”? Have you been dating a “narcissist”? Do you feel “paranoid” when crossing border controls?

Medical diagnostic terms are rarely taken at face value. If you have abdominal pain, unless you have just seen a doctor for a diagnosis, you rarely go around describing it randomly as gastroenteritis, gastric ulcer, adenocarcinoma, or appendicitis. Everyone knows that a medical term has a precise meaning, even if they don’t understand it. There is an unspoken rule about the casual use of medical terms in the common language.

Unfortunately, the rule doesn’t seem to apply to psychiatric diagnoses. The same laypeople who stay clear of using medical terms, happily blabber on about psychosis, paranoia, sociopaths, and narcissism as if they graduated from Harvard Med’s Department of Psychiatry and had a copy of the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) sitting on their coffee table.

The term “narcissist” is searched on average 1,220,000 times per month, and returns 178 million results in Google. Within the top five results, a few classics: “15 Signs You’re Dealing With A Narcissist”, or “What You Need to Know About Narcissistic Relationships”, in which the reader is casually encouraged to diagnose the mental health of their romantic partner or colleague. Narcissist is a term that has become such a clickbait winner in the media that its search volumes has increased eight fold in just ten years. The term has 60,000 results in the books section in Amazon! Are most of the book authors psychiatrists or psychologists? Take a wild guess.

The Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is a handbook used by clinicians, psychologists and psychiatrists in the United States to diagnose psychiatric illnesses. Published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the DSM classifies all categories of mental health disorders.

The word narcissist has become so bastardized that everyone is using it in casual conversation, but the medical definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the DSM-5 as a Cluster B Personality Disorder is very complex and thorough in its diagnostic criteria and features. Nothing to be taken lightly.

I suspect that most professional writers, journalists, bloggers or columnists have never opened a copy of the DSM. Every day in the media — whether mainstream like the NYT, the Washington Post, the Atlantic or the Guardian, or in popular online magazines and social media networks — writers use clinical diagnostic terms that are inappropriate (bipolar instead of cyclothymic, hysterical instead of histrionic, antisocial instead of schizotypal). Some terms are clearly misunderstood and end up highjacked by the media (antisocial, narcissistic, paranoid, psychosis, borderline), although they have a precise medical definition that everyone seems happy to ignore.

The word “sociopath” is another perfect example. It generates 300,000 monthly searches online and returns close to sixty million results. Try “Trump” + “sociopath” and you get five million results. Nowadays Trump is labeled a “sociopath” everywhere (Guardian, Washington Post, Atlantic etc…). And what does it mean? Basically nothing. The term “sociopathy” is briefly mentioned once in the footnotes of the DSM-5 as an obsolete and inaccurate reference to “Antisocial Personality Disorder” (ASPD). Clinically — if diagnosed by a psychiatrist — it could also apply to a Cluster A Personality Disorder (schizoid or schizotypal). More likely, it could just refer to a person who is unable or unwilling to behave in a way that is acceptable to society. An imprecise and obsolete term turned colloquial. Neither meaningful nor accurate, but highly derogatory if the objective is to vilify.

As a psychologist and nutritionist, I’m confronted every day with his type of misuse of language in the media around the subject of food and nutrition.

Here’s the problem and the moral of this story: The deliberate misuse of scientific terms that are bastardized or twisted into colloquialisms only amplifies ignorance. What gets lost in the process — which you can blame on lazy, biased, or opinionated writing — is critical thinking. Instead, emotional and irrational thinking becomes the norm. That’s how readers are manipulated.

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